Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Managing variation in the investigation of organismal development: problems and opportunities.James W. E. Lowe - 2015 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 37 (4):449-473.
    This paper aims to clarify the consequences of new scientific and philosophical approaches for the practical-theoretical framework of modern developmental biology. I highlight normal development, and the instructive-permissive distinction, as key parts of this framework which shape how variation is conceptualised and managed. Furthermore, I establish the different dimensions of biological variation: the units, temporality and mode of variation. Using the analytical frame established by this, I interpret a selection of examples as challenges to the instructive-permissive distinction. These examples include (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Thomas Harrison's Arca studiorum : A Search Engine in an Age of Notebooks. Essay review of Alberto Cevolini (ed.), Thomas Harrison: The Ark of Studies (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2017) xiv+142 pp. EUR 60,00 (cloth). ISBN 9782503575230. [REVIEW]Richard Yeo - 2020 - Berichte Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 43 (2):295-304.
    Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Of elephants and errors: naming and identity in Linnaean taxonomy.Joeri Witteveen & Staffan Müller-Wille - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (4):1-34.
    What is it to make an error in the identification of a named taxonomic group? In this article we argue that the conditions for being in error about the identity of taxonomic groups through their names have a history, and that the possibility of committing such errors is contingent on the regime of institutions and conventions governing taxonomy and nomenclature at any given point in time. More specifically, we claim that taxonomists today can be in error about the identity of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Taxonomy for Humans or Computers? Cognitive Pragmatics for Big Data.Beckett Sterner & Nico M. Franz - 2017 - Biological Theory 12 (2):99-111.
    Criticism of big data has focused on showing that more is not necessarily better, in the sense that data may lose their value when taken out of context and aggregated together. The next step is to incorporate an awareness of pitfalls for aggregation into the design of data infrastructure and institutions. A common strategy minimizes aggregation errors by increasing the precision of our conventions for identifying and classifying data. As a counterpoint, we argue that there are pragmatic trade-offs between precision (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • I never promised you a rose garden.… When landscape architecture becomes a laboratory for the Anthropocene.Henriette Steiner - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences 36 (2):178-201.
    In the summer of 2017, wildflower seeds were spread on a large, empty open space close to a motorway flyover just outside Copenhagen, Denmark. This was an effort to use non-mechanical methods to prepare the soil for an ‘urban forest’ to be established on the site, since the flowers’ roots would penetrate the ground and enable the planned new trees to settle. As a result, the site was transformed into a gorgeous meadow, and all summer long Copenhageners were invited to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Specimens, slips and systems: Daniel Solander and the classification of nature at the world's first public museum, 1753–1768.Edwin D. Rose - 2018 - British Journal for the History of Science 51 (2):205-237.
    The British Museum, based in Montague House, Bloomsbury, opened its doors on 15 January 1759, as the world's first state-owned public museum. The Museum's collection mostly originated from Sir Hans Sloane, whose vast holdings were purchased by Parliament shortly after his death. The largest component of this collection was objects of natural history, including a herbarium made up of 265 bound volumes, many of which were classified according to the late seventeenth-century system of John Ray. The 1750s saw the emergence (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Read. Do. Observe. Take note!Elaine Leong - 2018 - Centaurus 60 (1-2):87-103.
    This article offers a brief overview of recent studies on note taking and paperwork in histories of early modern science. Showcasing the wide variety of note-taking practices performed by a range of historical actors across diverse sites and knowledge practices, it argues that a focus on note taking and “paper technologies” enables us to put in conversation a number of linked epistemic practices from reading and writing to making and doing to observing and surveying to classifying and categorizing. By viewing (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The history and philosophy of taxonomy as an information science.Catherine Kendig & Joeri Witteveen - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (3):1-9.
    We undeniably live in an information age—as, indeed, did those who lived before us. After all, as the cultural historian Robert Darnton pointed out: ‘every age was an age of information, each in its own way’ (Darnton 2000: 1). Darnton was referring to the news media, but his insight surely also applies to the sciences. The practices of acquiring, storing, labeling, organizing, retrieving, mobilizing, and integrating data about the natural world has always been an enabling aspect of scientific work. Natural (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • What mysteries lay in spore: taxonomy, data, and the internationalization of mycology in Saccardo's Sylloge Fungorum.Brad Bolman - 2023 - British Journal for the History of Science 56 (3):369-390.
    Italian mycologist Pier Andrea Saccardo is best remembered for his monumental Sylloge Fungorum, the first ‘modern’ effort to compile all identified fungi within a single classification scheme. The existing history of mycology is limited and has primarily focused on developments within England, but this article argues that Saccardo and his collaborators on the Sylloge supported a vital transnational expansion of mycological knowledge exchange and played a crucial role in stabilizing the tangled knot of local naming and identification among the world's (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark